In the lead-up to artist duo Bambitchell’s performance lecture,
Dolphins, ships and other vessels, the experimental essay film
Bugs & Beasts Before the Law is available below from March 11 until March 18. This streaming presentation of
Bugs & Beasts Before the Law is in conjunction with the
exhibition of the same name, on view at the Henry through May 9. The film is 33 minutes long and features closed captions.
ABOUT BUGS & BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW AT THE HENRY
Bugs & Beasts Before the Law is a multi-part project and experimental essay film by Bambitchell, the artistic collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat (b. 1984,Pakistan) and Alexis Kyle Mitchell (b. 1983, Canada).
The film, co-produced by the Henry with Mercer Union, Toronto, in 2019, explores the history and legacy of the animal trials that took place in medieval and early modern Europe and its colonies in the Americas. Posing questions about the administration of justice and rights under law, it center on the phenomenon of nonhuman animals and inanimate objects put on trial and prosecuted for various crimes and offenses, ranging from thievery to assault and murder. Across five chapters, the film explores how power is performed through the body of the other, revealing the ways authorities and institutions mediate social relations and subjecthood through processes including the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. Events from the fourteenth through the early twentieth century are set within contemporary landscape and fabricated tableaux, blurring past and present, fact and fiction, and accentuating the law as a capricious system shaped beyond reason.
The installation features an immersive audio score developed in collaboration with Scottish composer Richy Carey and a built amphitheater structure that accentuates the spectacle of the courts as theatres of social control while also suggesting the potential for their deconstruction and reimagining new possibilities. At the Henry, on the occasion of their first museum exhibition in the United States, the artists will present a complementary installation of drawings based on their reading of E.P. Evans's book the
Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), the first chapter of which, titled "Bugs and Beast Before the Law," is the foundational English-language text on the medieval animal trials. Evans's appendix to his book presents itself as a definitive authority but is an incomplete record. This ambiguity is a central point of departure for Bambitchell, whose installation interrogates the fictive unity of historical narrative and perceived conclusiveness of inherited knowledge by questioning the narrator's reliability and opening the past to interpretation.
Bambitchell is the artistic collaboration between
Sharlene Bamboat and
Alexis Kyle Mitchell. Since 2009, their research-based practice has taken form through moving image, installation and performance to reimagine nationalist histories—playfully recycling official state documents and institutional archives. Their works have been exhibited at festivals and galleries such as Mercer Union (Toronto), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlin International Film Festival, Dazibao (Montreal), and the BFI London Film Festival (UK). Their practice has been the subject of writing in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, and the book Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made(Routledge, 2017). The duo held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2016-2017), The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire (2018) and The Darling Foundry in Montreal (2019). Bambitchell were long-listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award through the National Gallery of Canada.
CREDITS
Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law is developed in collaboration with Mercer Union, Toronto, and is organized for the Henry by Nina Bozicnik, Curator. Feminist Art Coalition at the Henry is made possible in part by an award from the National Endowment from the Arts. Additional support for this exhibition is provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities.
